Porn industry bands together against Bittorrent

It's been a well-know fact that a lot of the content swapped on P2P networks is porn. Even so, adult entertainment companies have been on the sideline of the fight against P2P piracy, leaving the mass lawsuit campaigns to their colleagues from the music industry and relying on mainstream Hollywood for anti-piracy lobbying.

It looks like this might change soon though. AVN is reporting that 65 porn industry representatives met in Los Angeles Wednesday to discuss their options in the fight against piracy. From the article:

"Several figures estimating the extent of piracy of adult material were mentioned at the meeting, and the consensus seemed to be that piracy accounted for about a $2 billion loss from the estimated $50 billion gross income from adult material worldwide."

Some of the producers at the meeting thought that the situation was even more serious. AVN quotes Megan Stokes from Shane's World saying:

"As the younger people who know exactly how to do this [download content] keep coming further and further into our bracket, I would suspect that within the next five years, there's not going to be anybody that we're trying to sell product to that doesn't know how to download it for free."

Some of the companies present apparently expressed reservation against a too aggressive legal strategy, arguing that instead the porn industry needs something like iTunes to make it easier for people to buy single scenes. There were also mixed feelings about DRM.

Five companies nevertheless decided to go forward and form a lose alliance with the goal of eventually establishing an industry association to initiate anti-piracy lawsuits. Part of that would be actions against commercial infringers that sell bootleg DVDs.

A web forum started by the companies in question makes it clear that they definitely want to go after P2P piracy as well. The forum alfready lists various Torrent sites, and members are encouraged to "take screenshots of the suspected infringements".

Comments

I once started investigating on http://www.moviesempire.com/ & http://www.dvdempire.com/ but stopped when it got too interesting. I suspected a link between the two and harvested a lot of information about other affiliated sites. I think I deleted all the stuff at some point but if someone wants to take up the work I could look for it.

NonWoot, not sure if that's completely true. Okay, most people don't care about the profit margin of a porn movie, but porn companies are getting smarter at framing the debate differently. They're starting to argue that the pirates don't do proper age verification instead of just whining about getting ripped off. And that's something politicians do care about ...